January 2016

Beasts of No Nation is a strange film. It’s anchored by two powerful performances, deals with timely and horrific subject matter, and is ably directed and photographed, but leaves almost no impression. If anything, it actually manages to make its cavalcade of horrors … kind of boring and distancing.

When Atlanta rapper B.o.B. released his contemptible / ridiculous Neal deGrasse Tyson diss track “Flatline” earlier this week – in which he manages to tie together Flat Earth theories, Lizard People conspiracies, Holocaust denial, and a healthy dollop of “Protocol of the Elders of Zion”-inspired anti-Semitism into one shitty, shitty package – the internet erupted.

Netflix’s recommendations have long been a source of amusement and morbid curiosity, deploying complex algorithms (or possibly just straight-up sales pitches) to come to unlikely conclusions about your personal preferences.

Did you enjoy the “cerebral, imaginative” World of Tomorrow? Why not check out its obvious spiritual prequel … Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining!

Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight For Freedom, the Netflix original just nominated for a best documentary Oscar last week, has two inescapable problems.

First, because the filmmakers are largely embedded with the Ukrainian resistance in 2013 and 2014 – and, understandably, because they want a narrative of heroic revolution that audiences can cheer – the film never really strays from a single set of viewpoints and experiences.

Don Hertzfeldt is a magician. Beginning with basic elements – rudimentary stick figures and bemused, detached commentary on modern life – he constructs elaborate universes. Their small details become invested with meaning and heartbreak, and the intentionally simple becomes endlessly complex.

In The Nightmare (2015), Room 237 director Rodney Ascher updates his enjoyable 2012 portrait of a handful of people with some … colorful interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, mapping similar themes onto an entirely different, much scarier vision.

The earlier film allowed ample, hilarious space for these Kubrick obsessives to present their wildly improbable visions of his true intent, but at the same time it served as an examination of the ways in which meaning is created.

At the end of 2015, The Hateful 8 barnstormed across select theaters, a whirlwind, even prior to its release, of debate. Positions were staked well in advance, and much of it came down to rather esoteric arguments about 70 mm projection and the future of film.